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Christ swings his right arm up, beardless and built like a wrestler. Mary turns in against his side and has stopped pleading. The rest of the wall holds over 300 figures, and every one of them is rising or falling around that arm.

Michelangelo was still at work on the Last Judgment, nearly 30 years after finishing the Sistine ceiling above it, when the first objection arrived. The pope's own master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, declared that so many nudes twisting through the air belonged in a bathhouse or a tavern, not the chapel of Christendom. Michelangelo answered in fresco: he painted Biagio into the bottom corner as Minos, judge of hell, with donkey ears and a serpent applied exactly where the master of ceremonies felt clothing mattered most. When Biagio begged the pope to order it removed, Paul III is said to have replied that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell. The fresco was unveiled in 1541, and the joke held for about 20 years after that. The Counter-Reformation hardened; Aretino wrote a long public letter of pious blackmail; and in its final session the Council of Trent ruled on sacred images: nothing lascivious, nothing indecorous. In January 1564 the Congregation ordered the Judgment's offending figures covered. Michelangelo was not consulted long: he died that February, at 88, before a brush touched the wall. The work fell to his own student and friend Daniele da Volterra. He spent months painting loincloths and drapery over the bodies he admired. In two cases, Saints Catherine and Blaise, he chiseled out whole figures and repainted them, because the censors thought the way they were arranged was obscene. Rome gave Daniele the nickname that outlived all his own paintings: Il Braghettone, the breeches-maker. The breeches kept coming after him; later popes added layer after layer until nearly 40 figures wore committee-issue cloth. One ambitious bystander offered a cleaner solution. The young El Greco, in Rome in the 1570s, let it be known he would happily tear down the whole wall and repaint it modest, decent, and no worse painted. Rome declined, and shortly afterward found reasons for El Greco to prosper in Spain. The restorers who cleaned the altar wall from 1990 to 1994 faced the codified question of which centuries to strip away. The ruling: the sixteenth-century drapery stays, as history; the 15 or so pieces added after 1600 came off. So the fresco today is a two-author work, the bodies by Michelangelo, the modesty by his grieving student. Biagio is still in the corner, still wearing his ears. A faithful copy made in 1549, before the censors, hangs in Naples, keeping the original score.